I usually don’t waste time at work with the blog but this has really hit all of my political buttons. In case you’ve been living under a blindfold for the last year or so, the US. government broke the law by asking the big telecoms to break the law and hand over customer data without warrants, which the telecoms gladly did. Unfortunetly the White House is throwing every state secret, classified, you can’t talk about this rule in the book at the people, congress, EFF, others, who are trying to expose this presidentially sanctioned criminal activity. They are also trying to pass an ex-post-facto law, which specifically indemnifies any telco that may have illegally helped the government in this case. Yesterday I read that the senate had agreed to attach language to the new surveillance bull that does just that.
This pisses me off to no end. I elected the democrats to stop just such tomfoolery from going on. It is better than we make no new laws than that we make bad laws such as this! If the democrats can’t convince the white house and the republicans of the need for new and good laws, then I am perfectly happy with their primary purpose being only to prevent the republicans from creating bad laws. But that is not what they are doing, out of what I must assume is fear that if no legislation passes they will be looks upon as not doing their jobs they are failing me. As far as I am concerned it is their job to ensure that no legislation passes. Yes, that takes the view that the republicans will not pass any good legislation. Not too far off in my estimation, as these republicans are ignoring the only tenet of their platform that I agree with, that being fiscal conservatism.
Luckily today I read that Senator Chris Dodd, who is a 2008 presidential candidate, has put the new bill “on hold” which, essentially is the best one man can do at preventing the bill from moving to the floor for discussion. And for that I must say thank you! Senator Dodd has proven to me that he is at least trying to do what he was elected to do. He is not afraid to do nothing when the only practical alternative is to do a bad thing. How hard is that people; come on. I can only hope that other senators and presidential candidates see his actions and copy them verbatim.